Children's social behavior: Reliability and concurrent validity of two self-report measures

In this study the psychometric qualities of Deluty's Children's Action Tendency Scale (CATS) and Michelson and Wood's Children's Assertive Behavior Scale (CABS) were assessed with 157 Dutch children. Both instruments are designed to assess children's self-reported responses to interpersonal situations, whereby aggressive, assertive, and submissive scores are obtained. In general acceptable psychometric properties were obtained for both the CATS and the CABS, except for the assertive scale of the CATS. Furthermore, it was found that the ability of both the CATS and the CABS to discriminate between submissiveness and assertiveness was low. Important gender differences that were found regarding the relations with measures of perceived competence and social desirability are offered as a possible explanation for the relative failure of the CABS and the CATS to unbind submissive from assertive behavior. The parent version of the CABS is offered as a possible alternative or additional source of information for the assessment of children's submissiveness. Recommendations for future applications and research are presented.This research was supported by Grant 2843 from the NFGV to the second author.     

Measuring the quality of life: Why,how and what?

In this paper three questions concerning quality of life in medicine and health care are analysed and discussed: the motives for measuring the quality of life, the methods used in assessing it, and the definition of the concept. The purposes of the study are to find an ethically acceptable motive for measuring the quality of life; to identify the methodological advantages and disadvantages of the most prevalent current methods of measurement; and to present an approach towards measuring and defining the quality of life which evades the difficulties encountered and discussed. The analysis comprises measurements both in the clinical situation concerning individual patients and in research concerning whole populations. Three motives are found for evaluating the quality of human life: allocation of scarce medical resources, facilitating clinical decision making, and assisting patients towards autonomous decision making. It is argued that the third alternative is the only one which does not evoke ethical problems. As for the methods of evaluation, several prevalent alternatives are presented, ranging from scales of physical performance to more subtle psychological questionnaires. Clinical questionnaires are found to fail to provide a scientific foundation for universally measuring the quality of life. Finally, the question of definition is tackled. The classical distinction between need-based and want-based theories of human happiness is presented and discussed. The view is introduced and defended that neither of these approaches can be universally preferred to the other. The difficulty with the need approach is that it denies the subjective aspects of human life; whereas the problem of the want approach is that it tends to ignore some of the objective realities of the human existence. In conclusion, it is argued that the choice of methods as well as definitions should be left to the competent patients themselves — who are entitled, if they so wish, to surrender the judgement to the medical personnel. Technical factors as well as the requirements of respect for autonomy and informed consent support this conclusion.     

Learning new names for new objects: cortical effects as measured by magnetoencephalography

We tracked the evolvement of naming-related cortical dynamics with magnetoencephalography when five normal adults successfully learned names and/or meanings of unfamiliar objects. In all subjects, the learning of new names was associated with pronounced cortical effects. The learning effect was of long latency and emerged as a change of activation in the same cortical network that was active during naming of familiar items. In four out of five subjects, the cortical learning effect occurred in the inferior parietal lobe. In three of these subjects, the cortical effect was left-sided. These results suggest that the inferior parietal lobe plays an important role in the acquisition of novel words, presumably as a part of working memory systems.     

European values in bioethics: why,what, and how to be used?

Are there distinctly European values in bioethics, and if there are, what are they? Some Continental philosophers have argued that the principles of dignity, precaution, and solidarity reflect the European ethos better than the liberal concepts of autonomy, harm, and justice. These principles, so the argument goes, elevate prudence over hedonism, communality over individualism, and moral sense over pragmatism. Contrary to what their proponents often believe, however, dignity, precaution, and solidarity can be interpreted in many ways, and it is not clear which reading would, or should, be favored by popular opinion. It is therefore dangerous to think that any one understanding of "European", or any other, values could be legitimately imposed on those who have different ideas about morality in health care and related fields. Bioethical principles should be employed to promote discussion, not to suppress it.     

Multitude, tolerance and language-transcendence

Rudolf Carnap??s 1930s philosophy of logic, including his adherence to the principle of tolerance, is discussed. What theses did Carnap commit himself to, exactly? I argue that while Carnap did commit himself to a certain multitude thesis??there are different logics of different languages, and the choice between these languages is merely a matter of expediency??there is no evidence that he rejected a language-transcendent notion of fact, contrary to what Warren Goldfarb and Thomas Ricketts have prominently argued. (In fact, it is obscure just what Goldfarb and Ricketts claim about Carnap.) Toward the end I critically discuss Michael Friedman??s suggestion that Carnap believed in a relative a priori.     

More Than Words: Fast Acquisition and Generalization of Orthographic Regularities During Novel Word Learning in Adults

In literates, reading is a fundamental channel for acquiring new vocabulary both in the mother tongue and in foreign languages. By using an artificial language learning task, we examined the acquisition of novel written words and their embedded regularities (an orthographic surface feature and a syllabic feature) in three groups of university students with different exposures (Group 1 saw 2 words once, Group 2 saw 20 words once, Group 3 saw 20 words three times). Recognition memory results for Groups 2 and 3 indicated that adults can learn novel written words even with just a single exposure, albeit repeated exposure improved target detection. A generalization task revealed that even the minimal exposure in Group 1 was enough for acquisition of the two embedded regularities. More exemplars and repeated exposure provided more robust effects for the syllable regularity. Finally, post-test interview showed that repeated exposure was needed to become aware of the regularities. The present results show that adults learn novel written words and their inherent regularities in a fast and effective fashion.     

Neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a morphologically rich language: an fMRI study

By employing visual lexical decision and functional MRI, we studied the neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a highly inflected language (Finnish) where most inflected noun forms elicit a consistent processing cost during word recognition. This behavioral effect could reflect suffix stripping at the visual word form level and/or subsequent meaning integration at the semantic-syntactic level. The first alternative predicts increased activation for inflected vs. monomorphemic words in the left occipitotemporal cortex while the second alternative predicts left inferior frontal gyrus and/or left posterior temporal activation increases. The results show significant activation effects in the latter areas. This provides support for the second alternative, i.e., that the morphological processing cost stems from the semantic-syntactic level.     

A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context

The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same words were embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied, the morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from the syntactic and/or semantic level and not necessarily from the lexical level, as previously assumed.